>> We can't predict what will happen next with COVID, but we can predict with absolute certainty that either a new variant of COVID or another virus is going to create another massive threat to world health in the future that we can be much better prepared for.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today, between cratering global markets, record-breaking inflation, a war in Ukraine and upcoming midterm elections in the United States, there's a lot dominating the headlines right now.

But, hey, the fact that there is even other news in the papers is a sign of just how far the world has come since 2020, when a new virus entered our lives.

>> The first death from coronavirus here in the United States.

>> 500,000 confirmed deaths.

>> At least 1 million COVID deaths in the U.S. >> The World Health Organization estimates that 15 million people died as a result of COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic alone.

And while the coronavirus is no longer the only story in town, the global fight against the disease is far from over.

This week, I speak with Dr. Tom Frieden -- he's a former director of the Centers for Disease Control -- for a look at where we are today in our fight against the coronavirus.

Then I'll look at the 35th anniversary of a milestone moment in another world-altering pandemic.

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Hello, Xi.

>> Your zero-COVID shtick is a total joke!

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> Summer is here, travel is back, and no one has to wear masks anymore, right?

I mean, surely that means COVID's over.

Right?

Not so fast.

The United States is recording more than 100,000 infections a day, still a rate five times higher than this time last year.

40% of us are living in areas considered high or medium risk for catching the disease.

The good news?

Hospitalization and deaths are down and substantially.

The bad news -- The disease right now is the most contagious that it's been.

Many experts believe COVID-19 will move from pandemic status to endemic status sometime this year.

New pills have been found to significantly reduce mortality for COVID patients and high vaccination rates, a growing herd immunity have meant that containing the virus is much easier than it used to be.

Pfizer and Moderna jabs are even being recommended for children six months and up.

But the situation is not so rosy in other parts of the world.

China's zero-COVID strategy has led to many fewer COVID deaths overall.

But it's also meant brutal lockdowns and strict rules and an economy that's slowing.

Just a few weeks after lifting a two-month lockdown, officials in Shanghai, China's wealthiest and largest city, have placed millions of people under new lockdowns, which in turn has led to rare public protests and anger among Chinese citizens.

In Africa, the death toll has also been lower than other parts of the world, due to its very young population.

But access to healthcare, that's been a lot harder to come by.

And so far, only 17.4% of Africans have been double-vaccinated, which means the continent is going to struggle with controlling the disease as it becomes endemic in other parts of the world and will keep creating new variants.

Vaccine hoarding by rich countries is partly to blame for low rates of vaccinations in the developing world.

And that's still going on, unfortunately.

A recent global outbreak of monkeypox, which is a virus that's closely related to smallpox, that whole pox thing -- you really don't want to get it -- has led the United States to hoard vaccines that are used to treat the disease.

Now, that's a move that comes despite the fact that the W.H.O.

doesn't recommend mass vaccinations for the disease.

And there have only been 100 cases, more or less, reported in the whole country.

What have we learned from COVID-19?

Are we prepared for the next pandemic?

And how many more jabs are we actually going to need before we can all free ourselves from this terrible disease?

This week, I speak with Dr. Tom Frieden, who should know the answers to all these questions since he served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and now runs the global health organization Resolve to Save Lives.

Here's our conversation.

Dr. Tom Frieden, thanks for joining us on "GZERO World."

>> It's great to be here with you.

>> Let me start with how you are thinking about the pandemic today, because, of course, you and I were talking about nothing but for just about two years and now we're feeling more comfortable walking around without masks, we're mostly vaccinated, at least those of us that think that's important.

And we really desperately want this to be in the rearview mirror.

Tell me and tell us how much that reflects accurately on the state of the pandemic as you see it, at least in the United States, and Europe and the advanced industrial democracies.

>> In countries where there has been access to vaccination and there's been a lot of exposure already, we're in a different world right now.

With the omicron variants, the COVID virus is not deadlier on a person-by-person basis than influenza.

And although we under-react to influenza every year, the fact is that if you're vaccinated and if you're vulnerable and get sick, you get Paxlovid, you're probably going to do pretty well with two big unknowns.

The first is long COVID.

Lots of people suffering with long COVID.

We don't understand it well.

We don't know how to treat it.

We don't know what the future will hold for it.

So something to be taken seriously.

And second, we don't know what the future will hold for COVID.

Bottom line, Ian, we can't predict what will happen next with COVID, but we can predict with absolute certainty that either a new variant of COVID or another virus is going to create another massive threat to world health in the future that we can be much better prepared for.

>> What does it look like for you going forward?

What kind of recommendations do you think are likely about the future of how frequently and what kind of vaccines people will be taking?

>> The bottom line is that people should get the vaccines that are available now, now when they're eligible and recommended to have them.

We don't know what the future will hold.

It may be that there's an annual vaccination.

It may be that the combination of vaccination and prior infection protects you for a few years.

It may be that we have what's called a multivalent vaccine against several different strains, or even a combination of COVID and influenza vaccines.

But that's all speculative about the future.

What we know now is that staying up to date with your vaccination is the single most effective thing that you can do to keep yourself out of the hospital and, quite frankly, out of the morgue.

>> Now, we know that we're seeing continually millions upon millions upon millions of cases all the time.

We know how transmissible this disease is.

In your view, does that make it much more likely that we are going to see even more transmissible variants?

Does it also make it more plausible that we could see variants that could be much more deadly than omicron?

>> I have to say, Ian, I've been stunned by how infectious this virus was and has become.

It started out like really infectious compared to other viruses.

And then it became even more infectious and then it became even more infectious still.

It's impressive.

If you look at December and January, more than a million Americans were getting infected every single day.

Now, there's nothing to say that a future highly infectious variant won't be deadlier than delta, which was quite deadly.

That's why we have to be prepared.

Anyone who predicts with certainty and confidence what's going to happen more than about three or four weeks out with COVID, frankly, Ian, they don't know what they're talking about.

>> Now, Tom, you said that you were really surprised by how infectious this disease has become.

I'll tell you who else was really surprised.

The Chinese government.

And I'm wondering what you would advise them to do, given what is clearly a failed zero-COVID policy in the face of their existing vaccines and the transmissibility of omicron but also recognizing how it appears impossible for them to get away from it.

>> So I think you have to step back and look at how China has done with the virus.

Initially, there was a clear failure in recognition and rapid response.

Their response after that was stunning, right?

And if they had a death rate like most other countries in the world, there would be a million people dead now in China who are alive today.

They have two problems, at least.

One of them is that they don't yet have highly effective vaccines available.

And second, they, like many countries in the world, including the U.S., have a fair amount of vaccine hesitancy or people who are not very willing, not very interested in taking vaccines, particularly among the elderly.

And if you look at what happened in Hong Kong, it's just stunning.

Many of us thought, oh, omicron must be a pretty wimpy virus, doesn't cause a lot of illness and death.

Well, that was if it affects people who have either been infected before or had vaccination.

Omicron in Hong Kong represented what happens in an immune-naive population, and it was devastating.

And if it's that devastating in all of China, that would be millions of deaths.

So they're in a bind.

They don't have the most effective vaccines and they don't have the most vulnerable people vaccinated.

Those, I think, are the two things to focus on -- get effective vaccines to the most vulnerable, and then you'll be able to have a policy that is not zero COVID infections.

But aim for zero or close to zero COVID deaths, which is, for example, what Singapore has done.

>> What are the lessons that you think we've learned and that we haven't learned but we need to learn for this horrible pandemic?

>> Ian, people always talk about lessons learned.

I think we should be talking about lessons that we'd better learn.

And I think there are three of them for COVID.

I call them the three R's -- that we need a renaissance in our public health system, we need a robust primary healthcare system, and we need resilient populations in terms of health resilience and in terms of societal resilience.

And just briefly, taking those one by one -- a renaissance in public health.

We need to invest in public health.

We need to make sure state, local, city, county levels are aligned along with global levels.

We need to make sure that public health has good engagement with communities, all communities in our society in terms of primary healthcare.

Unless we have good primary healthcare -- and we do not in this country -- unless we do, we're not going to be able to detect things promptly.

We can't diagnose and treat.

Use Paxlovid, for example.

We can't get people vaccinated effective.

We still have tens of millions of vulnerable people who are not up to date with their vaccination.

Primary healthcare is so important but so underfunded in our system, and third is resilient populations.

That means healthier.

So chronic diseases in good care, tobacco use decreasing, hypertension in control, diabetes in control.

That means that if there is an infectious disease shock, we're more likely to be able to withstand it and resilient in terms of trust.

Trust is the one thing that you cannot surge during an emergency.

We need to rebuild that.

We need to rebuild some of our common platform of understanding.

>> Now, look, I mean, I saw the movie "Contagion" and I saw it again right at the beginning of the pandemic.

And the CDC, they were heroes in that film.

And at the beginning of the pandemic, it certainly looked like people like Dr. Fauci and the CDC were very widely respected in the United States.

I don't think you can say that today and you've just kind of intimated that.

Where do you think they have gone wrong and what concretely needs to happen?

What could happen that could help to rebuild that trust for the American public?

>> Well, first, Ian, just about "Contagion," it was filmed at CDC.

I got to meet Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne and others, which was pretty exciting.

And the movie is pretty accurate.

Interestingly, the one thing that many people criticized it for at the time was, "Oh, they'll never produce a vaccine so quickly during a pandemic."

And here we are with mRNA technologies and a stunningly effective vaccine.

In terms of rebuilding trust in the CDC and in government more widely, it's very important that CDC re-establish its identity in separation from the White House.

Whoever's in the White House, because if all or most of the CDC press conferences are done as part of the White House, then a big part of the country, whichever side is in charge in the White House, is not going to believe what they say.

CDC is in Atlanta.

It has advantages and disadvantages, but that separation can be very powerful.

Second, CDC needs to follow its own playbook, as I think it's been increasingly doing.

Be first, be right, be credible, be empathetic, and give people proven, practical things to do to protect themselves and their family.

And third, have some successes.

Nothing succeeds like success.

And as CDC, which is doing great work, which still has thousands and thousands of people who dedicate their lives to protecting Americans 24/7.

As those successes become apparent, I think trust can be rebuilt.

>> Now, Tom, you've devoted your career post-CDC trying to advance public policy, understanding and action on the ground in the United States and around the world.

I'm wondering, given the target-rich environment that you now see, what's top of Resolve's agenda in terms of where you think you can make a difference post-pandemic?

>> In terms of preventing the next pandemic, I have a concern.

There's a lot of global discussion.

What's the structure?

What are some funding streams?

What should W.H.O.

do?

What should other organizations do?

But I'm concerned that we may be losing the focus on countries, making sure that every country in the world is able to find, stop and prevent health threats promptly and having steady progress doing that.

And that's where I think we really need to accelerate because we are in a real risk of going headlong into the neglect part of the panic/neglect cycle that we see with infectious disease outbreak, epidemic and pandemic after pandemic.

>> Tom, I want to ask you, how much damage do you think was done -- unnecessary damage was done on the basis of lockdowns, both more broadly as well as, say, for kids, for schools?

Where do you think -- Again, looking back on this over the last couple years, where do you think that there was really too much error on the other side?

>> Well, I was on record throughout saying I didn't think schools should be closed.

We knew from influenza that if you close schools, you're going to close them for a long time.

And we knew that that would be devastating for educational outcomes and devastating for the economy.

We also knew from the outset that outdoors was not a risk and so stay at home was a wrong concept, the concept of not having close indoor spaces.

I think those were the two biggest challenges in terms of going too far.

But, Ian, if you step back fundamentally in the U.S. at least, at least half of all of the deaths in 2020 could have been prevented by better lockdowns, smarter lockdowns, smarter closures that looked at what was happening.

You know, it's kind of like you see a hurricane coming.

You need to know what to batten down and what not to.

And then when it's gone, you can let up.

So in 2020, more than half of all the deaths were from failure to implement public health measures.

In 2021 and throughout 2022, more than half of all deaths have been from failure to reach everyone with vaccination.

>> I really didn't want to hear about another disease that I hadn't heard of before.

But monkeypox, you know, I mean, there's way too many headlines.

It bothers me.

Should I care?

>> Well, it certainly matters to people who have monkeypox and it matters to the communities in which it's spreading, including up in many countries, men who have sex with men.

It also matters that we don't know what's really happening in Africa with monkeypox because there hasn't been the kind of investment needed.

There hasn't been the kind of support for people who have been doing research on monkeypox for 20 years.

But there are a lot of unknowns in how it spreads, where it's spreading.

Can it be controlled?

Should we be using ring vaccination?

And because there's a lot we don't know globally, there's a lot we don't know in places that it's spreading newly.

We really are connected by the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the planes we travel on.

Anywhere in the world can connect with anywhere in the world within just a day or two.

And unless we invest in better understanding and better control of infectious diseases, they will continue to too great a degree to control us.

>> And that's Dr. Tom Frieden.

Thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

>> Thank you, Ian.

It's always a pleasure speaking with you.

♪♪ >> 35 years ago, the world was grappling with another public health crisis, a pandemic that to this day has infected over 80 million people worldwide and killed more than 36 million, more than double what we've seen from COVID so far.

I'm talking about HIV/AIDS.

And as we commemorate Pride Month this June, I want to talk about one remarkable piece of art that first captured the world's attention in 1987.

>> At dawn today, a quilt made by Americans across the country was unfurled.

Each of the 2,000 panels bears the name of an AIDS victim.

The silence spoke volumes.

>> What made me want to come out?

I'm sick of seeing my friends die.

>> And when people come by the quilt today, what do you want them to think about?

>> That these were people who were loved.

And that love is the most important thing, and that if we love each other and work together, we can beat this disease.

>> That last voice was from Cleve Jones, the longtime San Francisco gay-rights activist who conceived the idea for the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

>> I had the idea for the quilt on November 27, 1985, at the annual Candlelight Memorial to remember Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who were assassinated on that day in 1978.

Harvey was my mentor and a dear friend, and I was actually in City Hall that day.

By 1985, almost everybody I knew was dead or dying or caring for someone who was dying of AIDS.

And all of us were terrified, of course, and very angry.

The government response was shameful and we knew it was going to get much worse.

But mostly we were grieving.

So many of our friends had died and died so horribly and died so young.

And I wanted to illustrate the enormity of the crisis.

>> The quilt, which initially spanned a football-field-size swath of Washington D.C.'s National Mall in October 1987, has only continued to grow.

It would now cover 1.3 million square feet and weigh 54 tons if it was laid out in its entirety.

And into every patch of its fragmented fabric, friends and family have stitched in over 110,000 names.

For many, the quilt has served as the memorial service they never had.

>> Can you tell me about it?

>> Well, my lover died about three years ago.

Amongst other things, of course, I was not invited to participate in the family memorial service.

I was not included.

In fact, I wasn't even informed as to when it was.

>> Was this your memorial service?

>> This is my memorial service for Don.

>> Just last week, 35 years after it was first unfurled on the National Mall, Cleve Jones and hundreds of supporters displayed another large portion of that quilt in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to commemorate the anniversary.

>> Thanks to this quilt, all that hate and fear and despair has been replaced.

And for me, this quilt is the physical embodiment of love and courage and hope.

>> The National AIDS Memorial website allows users to search any name on the quilt, from Liberace to Freddie Mercury to the thousands and thousands of less famous people in between.

And the project has even inspired a seventh grader in California to start a quilt of her own to remember those we've lost to COVID.

She got the idea from her mother who actually worked on that AIDS quilt.

>> What do you see when you look at your quilt?

>> I don't see fabric.

I don't see pictures.

I see people.

>> There are, of course, as many differences as similarities between the HIV/AIDS crisis, which is now four decades old, and the COVID pandemic.

But they do both disproportionately target communities of color and poorer nations around the world.

21 million people in eastern and southern Africa live with HIV today.

That's more than half of all global cases.

And COVID's death toll has been four times higher in lower-income countries than in rich ones.

But in both cases, works of art, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, have served as a powerful way to process grief, in some ways to protest injustice and to stitch together a sense of community.

>> The quilt, over time, has become an extraordinary symbol of love and compassion and hope.

And I'm so grateful to the fact that it connected me, you know, to all of the parents who would never consider abandoning their child and to all of the congregations who held their members close and never would have imagined rejecting them.

♪♪ >> And on "Puppet Regime," Xi Jinping gets a rude awakening about his zero-COVID policy.

[ Thunder crashes ] >> [ Yawns ] Another great day in China.

Zero to worry about.

Well, bedtime for President Xi.

[ Thunder crashes ] Oh!

>> [ Laughs ] >> What in the name of Mao?

>> Hello, Xi.

>> Your zero-COVID shtick is a total joke!

If you want to get re-elected this fall, you're going to have to face reality.

>> Re-elected?

What country do you think this is?

>> Look, man, zero-COVID is about as likely as zero unread e-mails.

>> Or zero catfishing on Tinder.

>> Or zero gun violence in America.

>> Or net-zero carbon emissions.

>> Ha!

Zero death, zero taxes, zero Marvel movies, zero coverage of the royal family.

>> Okay, okay, I get it, I get it.

Wait a second.

You're supposed to be COVID, right?

>> What, do you think we're Christopher Robin and Eeyore?

>> And if you're COVID and we're inside and I'm not wearing a mask, does that mean... [ Thunder crashes ] [ Viruses laughing maniacally ] >> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see, you want more COVID -- of course you do -- you know where you can turn.

That's right.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...